[Vm-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] help needed with the new FFI plugin...

[Levente Uzonyi]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> But getting the FFI working on ARM and/or PPC is more effective than writing yet another plugin, no?  We can always add security to the FFI (essentially some
> way of disabling internal calls within the FFI plugin, e.g. based on cryptographic keys to enable it, or whatever).  So I really do appeal to people to help me
> put the effort in here.  I can't justify working on the FFI on ARM or PPC in my Cadence Newspeak gig; we're entirely on x86.  I /can/ work on the threaded FFI
> as we need it at Cadence, just as many other people need it.  But for me to move the threaded FFI ahead it needs to be on all platforms and that means I need
> help on the platforms I can't justify working on.
> 
> So folks, please give serious consideration to putting effort into something that may be a little harder at first but will yield major benefits slightly later.
> Let's defer gratification :)

QEMU can be used for emulating various CPUs, so if you don't have an ARM,
PPC or SPARC hardware, you can still develop/test FFI with it.

Threaded FFI is great, it opens new possibilities, but nowadays the 
feature I miss the most is the ability to call functions in 64-bit 
(x86_64) libraries (from a 32-bit VM/image).


Levente